Kristin teaching & learning in Korea

Hello Peace.

The state of my laptop has kept me pretty down lately. I took it across town to an Apple service center near COEX and had to come back two days later only to have the guy tell me that I need a new hard drive and that he can’t do anything about it. I was advised to go back across town to buy one in a Digitial mall of sorts then return with the hard drive to be installed. That would have cost me about four hours in the back and forth, waiting in line, searching and sighing…I was pretty much fed up with the place and decided to look elsewhere.

I got to the Digital mall in Yongsan, which has the most overwhelming selection of…pretty much all technology, and spent a few minutes navigating long aisles of cameras, mp3 players and cell phones. When I finally made it to the computer level of the complex, I asked around in broken Korean and pointed at my laptop until someone found and installed a hard drive on it. Come back in two hours, the shopkeep tells me curtly, software in two hours. He has Macbook software and wants to put in on after making my hard drive go. Awesome. Two hours later, I return to a crestfallen face and telling groan. I would have to go to an Apple service center because my laptop was too dated. Before I could get worked up over the long metro ride back to COEX, I’m told that there’s a service center in a random nearby building with red letters. Rejoiced, I start scouring the area for a service center…this part takes forever since almost every building has red lettered signs and I’m about to lose my mind when I heard this song playing outside somewhere:

Which reminded me of my time in France and this song:

Both songs really put me into a light-hearted and carefree kind of mood. I realized that the amount of money and the time invested into this trek all over town really wasn’t worth the energy I put into getting angry about it. Afterall, I’ve had my laptop for a long time and really haven’t had to put that much money into it (the Apple stores back home gave me a lot of free stuff). The fact that I lost the stuff on my hard drive…well, it sucks but it’s a chance for me to build a better music collection and actually print the photos I take.

Once this calm came over me, time flew by – I found the Apple service place and the absurdly friendly help guy fixed and cleaned my laptop in record time for a more than reasonable price. Looking back on it now, it seems silly to get so worked up over a piece of technology that I lived just fine without for over half my life. It’s worse that now that I have my laptop, I’ve pretty much stopped reading my books, sketching and writing. I can’t let myself get so involved with my laptop again, it’s just silly.